Chinese is a tonal language. When we sing in Chinese, we just ignore the linguistic tones, and use the musical tones. It does make us unable to understand Chinese songs without reading lyrics.

For example, there was an old song, with the lyrics:

夜夜想起妈妈的话，闪闪的泪光鲁冰花。

yè yè xiǎng qǐ mā ma de huà, shǎn shǎn de lèi guāng lǔ bīng huā.

Every night I remind my mom's word, my tears goes out.

Without reading the lyrics, I thought it was:

爷爷想骑妈妈的话，闪闪的泪光鲁冰花。

yé ye xiǎng qí mā ma de huà, shǎn shǎn de lèi guāng lǔ bīng huā.

If Grandpa wants to ride Mom, tears goes out.

[WTF, Mom is a horse or a bicycle?]

See, the meaning completely changed.

I knew I misheard only after I read the lyrics.

Another example:

The lyrics was:

原来原来你是我的主打歌。

yuán lái yuán lái nǐ shì wǒ de zhǔ dǎ gē.

As it turns out you are my title track.

I misheard as:

原来原来你是我的猪大哥。

yuán lái yuán lái nǐ shì wǒ de zhū dà gē.

As it turns out you are my piggy brother.

Another example, the lyrics was:

天地悠悠，过客匆匆，潮起又潮落。

恩恩怨怨，生死白头，几人能看透？

tiān dì yōu yōu, guò kè cōng cōng, cháo qǐ yòu cháo luò.

ēn ēn yuàn yàn, shēng sǐ bái tóu, jǐ rén néng kàn tòu?

The heaven and the earth are forever, passers-by are hurried, the tide is in and out.

Gratitude and grudges, life and death and grey hair, how many people can see through it?

I misheard as:

天地悠悠，果壳葱葱，炒起又炒落。

恩恩怨怨，生死白头，几人能砍头？

tiān dì yōu yōu, guǒ ké cōng cōng, chǎo qǐ yòu chǎo luò.

ēn ēn yuàn yàn, shēng sǐ bái tóu, jǐ rén néng kǎn tóu?

The heaven and the earth are forever, nutshells and spring onions, are being fried up and down.

Gratitude and grudges, life and death and grey hair, how many people can be beheaded?

As nobody wants to be “beheaded” (decapitated), it sounds so ridiculous that I immediately realized I must have misheard it, so I asked for lyrics immediately after I heard this song.

Another example, the lyrics was:

望求菩萨来点化

wàng qiú pú sà lái diǎn huà

Hope the bodhisattva come to enlighten me.

I misheard as:

网球菩萨来电话

wǎng qiú pú sà lái diàn huà

The tennis bodhisattva comes to phone me.

That's more ridiculous. Who is the “tennis bodhisattva”? Why does a bodhisattva make a phone call?

There is also a trend to ridicule some easily misheard lyrics, e.g.

1. Lyrics of songs that we used to mishear altogether 那些年我们一起听错的歌词
2. Lyrics of songs that we used to mishear 【TFBOYS】那些年我们听错的歌词
3. Lyrics of songs that we used to mishear, can't stop laughing 那些年我们听错的歌词，笑的停不下来
4. Lyrics of archaic songs that we used to mishear那些年我们听错的古风歌词

The only advantage I've seen is an artistic one. In Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria, every syllable has a tone, low, mid, or high. A very rich cultural practice of drumming has existed for a long time. There is a specific drum called a talking drum. It's cylindrical and has a drum head on each end that are connected by tight leather cords. The body of the drum is wood and shaped a bit like an hourglass. The drum tends to be about six or seven inches in diameter and twelve to sixteen inches long. It has a strap and is carried over the shoulder held to the drummer’s left side by his left arm. By squeezing the leather thongs with his arm the drummer can vary the pitch of the drum with some subtlety. A skilled drummer can capture the tones and vowel length of a Yoruba sentence, reflecting speech very accurately. The texts usually drummed are proverbs and antiphonal call and response.

Talking drum has been used very effectively in Yoruba literature. In Duro Ladipo’s folk opera Oba ko so (The King did not Hang), there is a scene where a lead character goes to the forest of witches, and his dialog with the witches is carried on by talking drum. It's a very powerful scene.

I have also seen a skilled drummer beat out text from a book handed to him, and a.member of the audience spoke, not read, the text after it was drummed.

Economy of words/space.

This might be perceived (more than real) by a non-tonal language speaker listening to a tonal language. To him a single ‘word’ can have many meanings depending on tone. To the speaker of a tonal language each sound is a word and is quite different. So economy can be a matter of perception.

Tonal languages generally have shorter words. Perfectly this would be monosyllabic. Thus you can speak and read ‘faster’ without increasing speed of speaking or writing.

But (there is always a but):

When words are printed on a page one might expect tonal languages to take up less space. This is not the case with many. Lao and Thai are tonal (five or six tones) and also have fixed long or short vowels. The written languages also have no gaps between words. Theoretically they should save time, space and money when printing. The opposite is the case, a translation English>Lao will take up around 15% more space. This is because of vowel and tone indicators written above or below words. These require extra space between lines. (Single space in English usually requires 1.5 space in Lao.)

Another language found in both Thailand and Laos is Hmong. This has 8 or 9 tones and almost all words are monosyllabic and end in a vowel (no final consonants). The usual way of writing Hmong is with the Roman alphabet and tones are indicated by a final letter added to each syllable/word (but not pronounced) e.g. Hmong = Hmoob (doubling of vowels indicates nasalisation, final B indicates high tone). This reduces the printed page in a translation English>Hmong by some 20%.

You gain some, you lose some.

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has a very nice entry on the distribution of tonal languages around the world (see also: Daniel Ross' answer to What is a tonal language?…):

WALS Online - Chapter 13: Tone — the white dots are languages without tonal contrasts. The pink languages have a ‘simple’ tone system, usually with a two-way high/low tone contrast.

The red languages have ‘complex’ tone systems. There are 88 languages (16.7%) in that sample with such complex systems, with a very specific regional distribution, especially common in (mostly West) Africa and East Asia.

The next question is what ‘most heavily tonal language’ would mean. There are several different ways to measure this:

• Which language relies on tonal contrasts the most extensively?
• Are tonal contrasts found in all words, or just a few? (That is, are there minimal pairs for most words, or is the tonal system marginal?)
• Are tones used just for lexical differences, or are they also a part of morphology, showing (for example) inflectional (agreement?) or derivational (noun>verb?) changes?
• Which languages have the most tones?
• Many languages have a high/low contrast. Are there more steps in between? High/low/mid? High/low/mid/mid-high/mid-low?
• What about contour tones which involve change from one tone to another?
• Which language has the most total tone types including these contours (like high + low + high-to-low + low-to-high, etc.)?
• Which language has the most complex contours (such as low-to-high-to-low)?
• What about tone interaction, also known as tone sandhi, where two adjacent tones interact and one changes due to the other? Some languages even have more complex patterns with three adjacent tones, etc. Sometimes this also results in simpler combinations where some combinations of tones are not permitted and therefore simplified.

All of the possibilities described above exist in various languages and are used differently. For example, tonal languages in Asia tend to have limited morphology so they use tones for lexical contrasts rather than (systematic) morphological derivation, but that is found in some languages in Africa.

As for the question of ‘which language has the most tones?’, you will find that languages have many more options for complex tone contours than for simple tones. Chinese is said to have complex tones, but most of this is based on contours rather than different unique simple pitches. (It varies by particular variety of Chinese.) Mandarin only has 4 tones, while Cantonese has at least 6 (methods of counting seem to vary a bit). So for Cantonese there is high, mid rising, mid, low falling, low rising, and low. There are only three level contrasts (I’m not sure if languages have more, or many more, than that), but by making some combinations or contours, more tonal contrasts can be added.

There is also a very nice list of tonal languages here: Tone (linguistics) #List of tonal languages - Wikipedia. According to the information there, one of the most tonal groups in the world is the Hmong-Mien family, with some languages having up to 12 distinct tones (that is, I believe including contours, not distinct, flat pitch levels).

Also related: What are tonemes?

The facile answer: Among the languages cataloged in PHOIBLE, the most tones (10) can be found in Bafut and Buli.

But questions like this are not easy to answer because they involve comparison of language-internal contrasts across languages. So there’s a clear and present danger of veering into the realm of apples/oranges.

Mandarin and other Chinese varieties provide an illustration: Does Shanghai Wu (SHW) have more or fewer tones than Beijing Mandarin (BJM)? By some analysis, SHW has 5 tones and BJM has 4 or 5 (including the light tone of reduced syllables). But the tones in SHW are closely linked to their syllabic environment: the checked tones can only occur in checked syllables, which Mandarin has generally lost; the low tones can only occur in syllables with voiced onsets, and Mandarin has much fewer voiced onsets than Wu. Taking that into account, there are are only 2 tonal distinctions in SHW that cannot be predicted by syllable type alone. On the other hand, SHW has more varied surface realizations of its lexical tones than Mandarin does. So, does SHW have 2 tones (most reductive analysis), 5 tones (most diachronically consistent analysis), or 9 tones (most surface-oriented analysis)? Or is it 5 tonemes and 9 allotones? Why not just 2 tonemes? How do you compare the tones of SHW with BJM when the languages don’t have comparable phoneme inventories and syllable types that influence the appearance of tones?

I was unable to find enough detail on Bafut and Buli to comment on their tonal systems. So let’s look instead at Vietnamese, which is well documented and high on the PHOIBLE list of phoneme inventories sorted by number of tones — 8 in this case, according to Kirby 2011; 6 according to The World's Major Languages. We find out quickly that at most 6 tones represent independent distinctions, as the other 2 are restricted to checked syllables, similar to what happens in Shanghainese, Cantonese, Burmese, etc. Six effective tonal contrasts is a large inventory by any standard. You can find more (dialects of Cantonese, arguably), but why? Most people who have opinions on this would presumably agree that Vietnamese, Cantonese, and several other languages have a large number of tonal contrasts.

If you’re looking for a prototypical example of a language with lots of tones, go with Vietnamese or Cantonese. If you want to play top trumps, pick a winner among the 6 languages listed on PHOIBLE that have 9 or more tones. If you’re interested in a thorough cross-linguistic comparison, that will likely turn into a substantial research project that would have to address foundational questions first.

One of my students from HongKong was always very nervous when she needed to talk with one of her clients who was from Xinjiang. Both of them spoke Mandarin with very strong accents. They hardly understood each other.

There are seven main dialects and languages in China(modern classification): Mandarin（普通话）,Gan（赣）,Yue（粤）,Xiang（湘）,Hakka（客家）,Min（闽）,Wu（吴）. They are very hard to understand each other with their own tongues. Mandarin is the official language of China. It`s the most widely spoken language and people in most of areas can understand standard Mandarin Chinese. But it doesn`t mean they can communicate with each other in Mandarin very well. Accents! Yes, accents make lots of confusion and misunderstanding. Most of the dialects speakers are influenced by their dialects and languages. Though they learned Mandarin, they are still affected by their own vocabulary, tones, pronunciation, specific phonetics and even sentence structures. That`s what the accents will bring to you. If the dialects are from Mandarin area, the local people can still speak quite good Mandarin with less misunderstandings. That`s because they share the same written system and literature. They are just dialects of Mandarin Chinese.

(pic from wiki)

Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker of a tonal language, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

By the same token, you could ask, "How do people whose languages have contrasting voiced and unvoiced consonants (pretty much everybody) whisper?" In whisper voice, you don't voice any sounds at all, and the distinctions lik p/b, t/d, and k/g, are lost. However, other phonological attributes still serve to distinguish these (as well as context). For example, the short 'a' in "cat" is shorter in duration than the short 'a' in "cad". These kinds of cues help a listener of whispered English to differentiate otherwise merged sounds.

For the case of most tonal languages, other linguistic phenomena probably also take up the slack where the tones are not prominent. For example, Vietnamese "ba/" (mid rising) is shorter in duration than "ba\" (low falling), so even if the tone or tone contour is not available to the listener, it is probably not that hard for a native speaker to distinguish them based on other cues.

I think the advantage is nice, but minimal. It certainly makes you more sensitive and receptive to the concept and importance of tones from the very beginning, but it will not replace learning the tones of the new language, nor will it give you an advantage about the exact tones of certain words.

To give a comparison that is more meaningful to learners who come from non-tonal languages, think about the distinction between short and long vowels, which may be phonemic, i.e. distinguish the meaning of (unrelated) words in a language. This is, of course, not completely analogous to tones, but this is the closest analogy you can get that makes sense to most non-tonal language speakers.

Vowel length in Hungarian can be phonemic, e.g. ö [ø] and ő [ø:] has some minimal pairs:

• török (‘Turkish/Turk’, or ‘I break [sth]’)
• tőrök (‘daggers’)
• törők (‘people who break [sth]’)

There are, of course, many other languages that exhibit this feature. Many languages don’t have it, e.g. Italian is best known for not making this distinction and this is the main source of humor in the viral video about the Italian man who went to Malta. (“son of a beach”)

Now, when I started learning Finnish, the phonemic nature of vowel length was clear to me, and if people with Italian as their first language start to learn Finnish, will struggle for a while to distinguish short and long vowels, but once they have it, we both will face exactly the same challenge: having to memorize with every word which vowels are short and which are long.

The same way, if e.g. Thai speakers start learning Mandarin, they will bring a ‘built-in’ sensibility for tones, but besides the fact that their 5 tones don’t completely map to the 4 tones in Mandarin, they will still have to memorize the correct tone for every word in Mandarin, just like a non-tonal background learner.

Only exotic languages such as many African ones are truly tonal languages (i.e. languages where the pitch, the frequency of the tone, carries the information that distinguishes possible meanings).

But Czech (much like French) is usually said to be a partially tonal language because of one exception in which “grammar” doesn’t have the monopoly over the meaning (in English and German, it always does). The tone is used in Czech to distinguish declarative from interrogative sentences (in plain English, statements from questions).

For example, “máš měsíčky” (you have your menstrual days) may be said using different tones, to indicate “máš měsíčky?” (do you have your menstrual days now?), a question about the very same bit of information.

Famously enough, the people like me who are living in Western Bohemia around Pilsen (and perhaps Southwestern Bohemia, near Domažlice and perhaps Klatovy) also use the tones to distinguish the questions but our melody is different than the standard Czech melody and it is more intense. Other Czechs often say that the “Pilsner folks are singing while speaking”.

In a typical Czech question, the last word has a somewhat increasing pitch. In the Pilsner dialect, the last word of a question has a massively lower (yet constant!) pitch than all the previous words. All the high-pitch previous words in a question tend to have alternating frequencies of the syllables (high vs very high).

In this prank, the Pilsner melody sounds intense. A radio host (the first person who is heard) called a pensioner from Přeštice, South of Pilsen, and asked him whether he picked some wonderful stuff from a trash can. I think that the melody is distinctive even for non-Czech speakers and you could even identify the pensioner’s questions, e.g. the question “KDOPA TO řika:l” around 0:41.

No, the standard Dutch language isn’t tonal.

The only tonal variant of Dutch is Limburgish, a regional language spoken in the border area of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

A tone is a unit of sound just like any sound in English, so it can change the meaning of a word. If a distinction isn’t made, people might get confused. For instance, in English we make a distinction between z and s. If you say the word horse and ignore the distinction (instead pronouncing the s as a z), people could think that you said “whores.”

Chinese originally had no tones. Over time, sounds dropped from the ends of words. To compensate for the loss, tones arose through a process called tonogenesis. Similarly, in British English, when an r is dropped from the end of a word or syllable, the preceding vowel is lengthened. Otherwise, people might think they’re saying “Jan” when they’re actually saying “yarn.” While that isn’t the same thing as a tone, the process is quite similar.

From my skimming of the literature on tonogenesis, linguists generally believe that tone becomes contrastive when it is needed to replace another distinction that is weakened or disappearing, often voicing (as Quora User’s excellent answer observes for Seoul Korean). Also, final fricatives, as was the case in Old Chinese, may influence tone to be left behind them.

Linguists mostly focusing on East Asian languages used to think that monosyllabic morphemes are a near-requirement for tone to emerge, but that cannot be the case: many Bantu languages are tonal, and they sure are polysyllabic.

But if the general theory is plausible, that disappearing contrasts and disappearing consonantal endings are going to shape tone left behind them, then I would suspect a very surprising candidate. It sounds batshit insane. But the leading theories of how tonogenesis happened for Chinese and Vietnamese and other should predict that something is going on there, and if there isn’t, well, then we need to reconsider our theories of tonogenesis.

French.

It has lost a lot of its final codas, so that verb endings are no longer distinct, and neither are most plurals. il parle “he speaks” and ils parlent, “they speak”, sound exactly the same.

Or do they?

Are French speakers actually finding some way to distinguish the two?

And if they aren’t, why did the Chinese find a way?

(I had this in my drafts folder for nearly a year, and today went, what the heck, I’ll post it.)

Dear Eddie Schodowski!

I suspect that you might have the very sharp critical thinking, so you do not just accept anything written on Internet, but always check it out, before accepting it as the fact in reality.

Yes! Vietnamese is a tonal language by its very nature. This is the answer from me, not a linguist but a native speaker of Vietnamese language. All theory is grey, only the tree of Life is forever green.

Let’s see a few example:

1• Ca: to sing v • Cá: fish. n

• Cà: Aubergine. n

2• Tre : bamboo. n

•Trẻ: Young. adj

3•Trâu: buffalo. n

•Trấu: rice husk.n

•Trầu: betel. n

4• Dê: Goat. n

•Dế: cricket. n

• Dễ: easy. adj

5•Dưa: Melon. n

•Dừa: Cocconut. n

•Dứa: Pineapple. n

Actually, in highschool, we have learnt that the very first inhabitants who settled on the territory of Vietnam, used to speak a non-tonal language, about four or five thousand years ago. But their language was gradually “tonalized”due to the interaction with the other ethnic group who spoke a tonal language, and those two ethnicities assimilated into each other. And afterward, there were also the other ethnic groups came to join that union. Their descendants are Vietnamese people today. And the new language that created from that ancient intetgration gradually become modern Vietnamese language.

My personal theory is quite different: Our ancestors just simply decided to make their language become more vibrant by the tones in their free time, as a form of entertainment to avoid depression in the dangerous and hard life at that time. They kept on that tradition from generation to generation, untill it turned out a whole new language. (who knows, anyway?)

And today, the new words are still created in the Vietnamese language by its own native speakers.

“The advantages of speaking tone languages

There are some pretty interesting advantages to speaking a tone language.

1. Perhaps most interestingly, the phenomenon known as “perfect pitch” or “absolute pitch” – where an individual can distinguish what musical note a certain sound is hitting without any reference note – seems to be more prevalent amongst speakers of tonal languages. A study in the US in the 2000s and another in 2012 found that speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese respectively were both more likely to possess this ability in addition to being better at distinguishing musical tones than speakers of non-tonal languages.

2. Another advantage of tonal languages is that their speakers use them to more easily communicate at a long distance. This is or was done using drums to replicate the tones in parts of Africa. While in parts of Central America, whistles are used.” (as tones>vowels>consonants work better in a noisy environment, and travel further and not to be absorbed by background noise, a tonal language tends to be better at communication at a long distance/ in a noisy environment than a non-tonal consonant-heavy language (e.g. Zulu>>Russian)

in addition to the two advantages mentioned in the article above,

3. Tones provide an extra tool to encode information, so for the same inventory of consonants + vowels+phonotactics, a tonal language tends to be shorter than a non-tonal language, hence more efficient. (Still, some tonal languages can be polysyllabic and not compact at all eg. Zulu)

Disadvantages

1. As mentioned in the article above, for tonal language speakers, I wonder if the tones would be easily off when the weather is dry.
2. For some complex tonal languages with a practice/culture that “the tones should more or less correspond to the melodic contour of the song (eg. Vietnamese and Cantonese)”, writing lyric is not only challenging but a pain.
3. Tonal languages may be challenging for L2 learners speaking a non-tonal language and with amusia.

Punjabi is in the process of developing tones in some of its dialects. Many of the eastern dialects, the varieties spoken in India (including the Amritsar-based standard as used by much of the Sikh diaspora in the UK, US, and Canada) have been replacing the so-called ‘breathy voice’ feature with tone, while the western dialects, including most of the ones from Pakistan, have retained the ‘breathy voice’ intact.

‘Breathy voice’ is what distinguishes the voiced series of consonants (b, d, g etc) from the voiced aspirate series (bh, dh, gh) in most of the Indo-Aryan languages, including standard Hindi / Urdu. The phoneme /h/ is also characterised by ‘breathy voice’.

So for instance, take the following words from standard Hindi / Urdu and western dialects of Punjabi, which are definitely not tonal (by <R> I am indicating a voiced retroflex flap consonant, <Rh> is its aspirated variant):

• kaRi ‘bracelet’
• kaRhi (a type of soup made from chick-pea flour and yoghurt – I've posted my recipe here on Quora)
• ghaRi ‘watch’

In eastern / Sikh Punjabi, these are pronounced as follows, respectively:

• kaRi (same as above – neutral tone)
• kàRi (starts on a high pitch, then falls down toward the neutral position as you get to the second syllable)
• káRi (starts on a low pitch, then comes up toward the neutral position for the second syllable)

From a historical linguistic position, the sound change is easy enough to describe: the stressed vowel acquires a low tone if the original breathy voice consonant comes before the stressed vowel, and a high tone if the breathy voice consonant comes after the stressed vowel, while the breathy voice feature itself drops out (leaving a voiceless stop word initially and a voiced one internally).

You could call this more of a pitch accent then a tone phoneme, but it is on its way; there is evidence to suggest that at least some of the developments of tone in other languages started in a similar way.

The major mainland Southeast Asian languages have tones. Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese all originated closer to China, then spread south. Tonogenesis of tones from other lost phonetic features likely happened in historical times over an area including Chinese and these languages.

Many West African languages are tonal, though typically there are two tones rather than 4 or 5.

World Atlas of Language Structures has a map showing the prevalence of tone worldwide. http://wals.info/feature/13A Besides sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, there is another cluster in New Guinea and a sprinkling in the Americas.

Of course it does but not in the way the question implies.

Skills with the tones of Mandarin are crucial but thinking about the tones can slow down communication a lot.

'Mastering tonal distinction' is a mouthful. Sure it is important but what the heck? The concept refers to something in the set of skills learners need to develop.

This set of skills is developed in all successful Mandarin learners, and doesn't need to be worried about too much.

When I began learning Mandarin 40 years ago, I was very fortunate in that I was very quickly able to develop skills with the tones.

But I will tell you a thing that's interesting: I have found over the years that many people who learned Mandarin as a foreign language very successfully (impressing me, and I'm a hard one to impress) did in fact struggle with something at the beginning. Some of the time that something was the tones. So, learning the tones well is not impossible.

Also

There are some very good YouTube videos that give advice on how to learn Mandarin tones.

There are many more really good ones, but the one with Michael Campbell of Glossika is great, as is the one with Chris Parker of Fluent in Mandarin.

Tonogenesis is a fairly complicated and somewhat contentious subject, but a super-simplified overview is as follows:

Some languages gain tone by areal influence—they are spoken near or in the same area as another language that has tone, and gain tone through borrowing or transference by bilingual speakers.

In the absence of any existing tonal languages, however, tones tend to arise as the result of the merger or loss of consonants. Different kinds of consonants have different effects on the pitch of neighboring vowels, naturally causing rises or drops in vowel pitch as an inherent part of consonant articulation (many consonants in fact do not have any single unique phonetic form, and are recognized only by their patterns of alterations to surrounding vowel formants). When different consonants merge, words that would otherwise become homophones may then be distinguished by preserving the pitch changes as phonemic features in-and-of themselves, which become realized as vowel tones. Similarly, if a consonant is lost entirely, its pitch effects may be left behind. This process is well-evidenced by Punjabi, whose modern pronunciation involves tones, but which is written without tones—but with a bunch of archaic consonant letters which are no longer pronounced as consonants, but regularly correspond to the modern tones!

Sometimes, this can take multiple steps, e.g. by going through vowel phonation first; for example, a consonant ‘h’ may disappear to be replaced by breathy voice (contrasted with normal modal voice) on neighboring vowels, with that phonation distinction later being replaced by a tone distinction (restoring universal modal voice, which is easier to articulate).

For starters, I think every language has at least some areas of shortcoming when it comes to communication. Off the top of my head, one of the shortcomings of English is that the word “we.”

We

It doesn’t indicate whether you’re including the person you’re talking to, or including you and someone else in the third person. It also doesn’t say how many are on the group called “we.” Other cultures might add that “we” doesn’t give you the gender of the people in the group or their social status”

But this occurs in some form in EVERY language. Logically, if languages have shortcomings, they also must have areas where they excel. My conclusion is that no, there are no languages that are inherently better than others at communication.

Yes, it’s possible, but I think that how much information the listener or, in this case, watcher gets varies depending on the language and the tonality.

For instance, deaf people or those very hard of hearing frequently use lip reading to help supplement what they hear regardless of the culture they are a part of.

Though, I feel like the tonality can indeed make understanding the information harder. For many languages in Africa, they usually have a rising and falling tone. Since many of these languages have homophones that are really only able to be differentiated based on the tone or context, I think it would be harder than with a non-tonal tongue.

At the same time, I also feel like the degree to which the language is monosyllabic or polysyllabic may play a role, too. So, I guess the ease might depend on the language. For instance, Mandarin Chinese (4 tones) is fairly monosyllabic and also even has a lot of homophones. I’ve been learning Chinese for quite a while, and still sometimes get confused with what a word may mean in that moment that I hear it because “qing” could be several different words altogether if you’re not aware of the tone or the context. On the other hand, Zulu is a very polysyllabic language that is also tonal (rising and falling tones).

So, for instance, “please, can you bring my bag?” in Zulu (no tones marked) is:

sicela, ungaletha isikhwama sami?

Whereas in Mandarin, it’s:

请你带我的包吗？(qǐng nǐ dài wǒ de bāo ma?)

Note: I think the degree to which a non-tonal language is understandable with lip reading also may depend on the language, and the syllabic nature may not matter as much. Japanese, for example, is rather polysyllabic and isn’t tonal, but has several homophones. One example is “kami,” which can mean “hair,” “god,” or “paper.” By that point, I think context would matter a lot. Also, bear in mind that, irrespective of the language, lip reading is notoriously ineffecient if you want want to know with high accuracy what one is saying.

Middle Korean and probably Old Korean were tonal language, and some modern dialects are so, too.

But standard Korean is not tonal.

One of the tonal dialects is Gyeongsang dialect (Southeastern Korean dialect). It has tones as a distinctive feature that distinguishes, for example, two meanings of 우리 as “cage” versus “we” by its tonal difference.

Some people claim that it’s not tones but accents, but I think it’s mixed. At least the southeastern dialect has both tones and accents if it is controversal. If there aren’t tones, then we can’t explain why there are some words distinguished by its tones which can bear also the glottal stop naturally.

Indeed, tones are mostly ignored in Mandarin singing. Maybe not so much in Cantonese songs, but I'm not sure. So you actually don't hear the tones in Mandarin pop songs. It's still comprehensible, though.

In my experience, this is different in other tonal languages, pop songs and chansons in Vietnamese have quite clearly audible tones and especially in slow songs this becomes obvious. You still hear the melodie, but you also hear the ups and downs of the single syllables. As if you simply pitch them higher and lower on the musical scale.

As for Thai, I'd say it's inbetween. In some songs I can hear a few "lexical" tones, but usually not so much.

Perhaps, but definitely not in the way Mandarin, Vietnamese, Cantonese, or Thai are.

Tagalog has a stress system that is likely somewhere between a tone system and a stress system, sort of like Japanese, Croatian, Danish. Like Danish, it has other supersegmental things going on as well.

Tone is not really phonemic in Tagalog, but marks the edge of prosodic words.

So in the phrase:

Bababa ba?

The final clitic ba is marked with question intonation, and marks the end of the [verb-monosyllabic pronoun-clitic-polysyllabic pronoun] combination.

If you said:

Bababa po ba kayo sa hapon?

The final clitic, kayo would bear the falling question tone.

As for other supersegmental stuff going on, just like Danish, Tagalog has words that are distinguished by word-final glottal stops:

bata [ˈbata] ‘bathrobe’

bata [baˈtaʔ] ‘child’

Some dialects of Tagalog are definitely losing these word-final glottal stops.

My limited instincts, as an L2 speaker of Tagalog, tell me that Tagalog uses glottal stops as additional stress information, so words with final stress also end in a glottal stop.

Unfortunately, no one has ever written a lengthy description of Tagalog phonology, dialectology, etc. There have been a few theory-heavy approaches, but they never are very descriptive and focus a lot on the morphology-phonology interface.

This is all based on my own knowledge as a linguist who took one summer intensive of Tagalog, and whose grandmother is Ilonggo (I speak Tagalog with her sometimes).

As for whether it has tones, I would not be surprised if, like Japanese, Tagalog ‘stressed’ syllables bore their own tone, but then unstressed syllables were untoned.

Most dialects of Japanese have a tonal system where only one syllable in a word is toned, and there is not really any contrast between different tones. In Kyoto and southern Honshu, the system is a bit more complex, and in northern Honshu, it is a bit simpler.

This is often referred to, descriptively, as a ‘Pitch-Accent’ system. It’s basically a stress system where instead of just stress, there’s also tone, but like a stress system, the tone is on only one syllable and it does not contrast with other tones (e.g., it doesn’t matter if the tone is rising or falling).